8000 METER PEAKS

Reinhold Messner: "All
the 8,000ers have one, nothing else and that is a main summit.
According to his or her personal experience, each person
must decide by himself or herself where they have been. Always
for me the most important thing is not where the others have gone but the
experience lived through".

Erhard Loretan:
"This 'race' is a little outside the objective. I do not believe that
it is a race between climbers rather it is between the
"media". Perhaps I am mistaken. If
people want to play, in my opinion, the climber must reach the highest
point and without oxygen, of course. In
fact, if you have a minimum of ethics, your heart will say to you if your climbing
is clean or not. Personally,
I went twice to Shishapangma because the first time, in 1990, the route to the
main summit was dangerous."

Krzysztof Wielicki: "If
we agree that the 14 8,000ers' main summits means that "the highest
point" then this always the main summit".

Carlos Carsolio: "To
complete the 14 8,000ers one talks about reaching main
summits of the fourteen mountains.
These mountains have 21 independent summits of more than 8000 meters,
and a considerable amount of "antesummits" (he
considers an antesummit the central top of Shishapangma), if these are
subsidiary summits then there are 22). That
is to say, to be able to complete the fourteen, you must reach the highest point
of each one. An interesting
challenge for the generations of the future is to get to complete 21 summits,
one of them even remains unclimbed - the Mid Lhotse summit".

Juanito Oiarzabal
"The summit is the
summit and peculiarly it agrees with the highest point "